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Today’s posts will highlight some of the quirky sides of Vienna that are usually off the tourist track.

Hundertwasser House

The Hundertwasser House Vienna is an apartment house in Vienna, Austria, designed by Austrian artist Friedensreich Hundertwasser.  He is widely renowned today for his revolutionary architectural designs, which incorporate natural features of the landscape, and use of irregular forms in his building design.

He claimed that architecture should not conformed to straight lines and flat floors as it is going against nature (the very nature when Man first walked the earth – which is not flat and full of unknowns).  Thus, the Hundertwasserhaus block designed by him featured undulating floors (”an uneven floor is a melody to the feet”), a roof covered with earth and grass, and large trees growing from inside the rooms, with limbs extending from windows.

Hundertwasser took no payment for the design of the house, declaring that it was worth it, to prevent something “ugly” from going up in its place.  To find out more about Hundertwasser House, there is a cafe which provides free screenings of a video (in German or English) about the designer, Friedensreich Hundertwasser and the buildings.  This video will provide you with a sneak peek at the interior of these houses.

Comparison of a normal apartment building versus the Hundertwasser apartment building

Besides this apartment building, Hundertwasser also designed a number of buildings with unique architecture around the world e.g. Germany, Japan.  See some examples of these buildings as well as the Vienna Hundertwasser House in this video:

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1. Quirky Vienna – Opera Toilet, Flak Tower
2. Cesky Krumlov Castle – Ghost Stories, Bears, Unique Architecture
3. Mozart Madness and Public Transport in Vienna